Recovering from my own experiences of Breath of the Wild. That's what I've been doing for the past three years. Here's what I can do: I can play other video games, I can enjoy other video games, but I can also criticize them and wish they were more like the other video game that I've put on a weird pedestal. No one should reasonably ask a studio to take the risks Nintendo took, but that's where I'm at: Breath of the Wild exists and I can't make it unexist. To expect developers to work in a vacuum like Nintendo, to create a game as experimental and strange as Breath of the Wild. I understand it's unfair to hold other video games to the same standard. You could also argue only Nintendo has the built-in audience ready to purchase and consume a game like Breath of the Wild. You could argue that only Nintendo has the ability to fund, develop and release a game like Breath of the Wild. Nintendo's stubborn need to march to the beat of its own drum has absolutely been the reason for some baffling decisions in the past, but it has also resulted in a level of quality control and innovation no other video game publisher on the planet can hope to touch. The AAA "experience." Climb the tower, unlock the missions, craft the weapons, open the loot boxes, customize your character. Other games seem determined to homogenize, to merge toward the one grand video game. Pushing along the same predetermined path built before it arrived fully formed from that alternate universe. In some ways it feels like video games have spent the last three years desperately trying to forget that Breath of the Wild existed. In 2019 I spent way too long playing Trials Rising, a perfectly balanced game about motorbikes inexplicably burdened with a leveling system and loot boxes. It's Destiny, Spider-Man, God of War, Red Dead Redemption 2. Bolted inside a living, breathing poker machine where numbers appear over the heads of enemies you fire bullets into.Īnd it's not just one game, it's most of them. You are locked inside a universe intent on showing you every intricate facet of its work. Now you are "leveling up." In the process of developing a "skill tree." You are en route to accepting your "mission" at the "mission marker." You are accumulating "experience points." Now you are "crafting." Building gear and weapons.
I can't even look at this screenshot without wanting to start the game all over again.Ĭompared with Breath of the Wild, other video games feel like islands loosely connected by discrete systems that rarely mesh. It is, almost certainly, one of the best video games ever made. An intricate space designed, not to be catalogued or conquered, but explored and savored, complete with a cohesive set of intertwining game concepts that could be tinkered with but, unlike others, was somehow resistant to the breaks in logic that subvert regular video game experiences. It was the most obvious thing you can imagine: an open-world game that focused almost exclusively on its open world. Breath of the Wild unraveled decades of open-world bullshit and began afresh like none of it existed. A place where these transitions feel seamless.īreath of the Wild was a game that felt traditional, but in the ways it wasn't it felt revolutionary. A world where you're accidentally riding a reluctant bear into a spontaneous wildfire one minute, then scrambling solo toward gorgeous vistas the next. Where open worlds aren't celebrated for their size and instead focus on in-the-moment experiences that spiral into spontaneous, weird emergent stories that are yours and yours alone.Ī universe where exploration is a means to its own end, where meaningful encounters occur effortlessly, where there is a story around every corner.Ī timeline where systems interplay in ways that encourage chaos. Where RPGs aren't dependent on mission markers and laundry list fetch quests. Breath of the Wild feels like it arrived fully formed from another dimension.Ī dimension where video games evolved differently on an alternate timeline.